The changes made resulting in a smoother registration for the spring 2012 semester were ironically put into place in October 2011, just prior to problematic registration that fall said Brian Borchers, assistant director for information systems at University of Idaho.
“We had just completed a rebuild of the Banner systems on our regular five-year hardware renewal cycle,” Borchers said. “This rebuild included new servers which were appropriately sized and configured by the ITS Systems Team.”
Borchers said the system failures were caused by a single SQL query which was executed differently in the new version of the Oracle database on which Banner is hosted.
“It was only under the extreme load of registration that the query had a noticeable impact on the system, but it was enough to drive the database into a failed state,” Borchers said.
Borchers said once the query was discovered, his team was able to rewrite it so Oracle could execute it efficiently.
UI junior Gregory Taggart said he noticed the change in the system.
“There was a 100 percent difference,” Taggart said. “I remember last time I did it I was locked out for like an hour.”
Taggart said he was able to instantly access it this time around with no problems.
Borchers said system failures, like the ones students have become acquainted with, have not been a common issue in his overall history with the university, but performance has always been a challenge with this service and activity is closely monitored during each registration event.
“Traditionally, we have throttled user access to the registration process to avoid overwhelming the database server and that strategy has worked for the most part in preventing full system failures,” Borchers said.
Borchers said in the past, throttling user access limited connections to the application resulting in delays. He said the throttling threshold has been set much higher so the impact on students is much less noticeable.
“When I started here in 2004, registration was scheduled at midnight to minimize load on the servers,” Borchers said. “When we rebuilt the Banner systems in 2005, we were able to move registration to 7 p.m. because the systems were able to handle a greater load, and now with the changes made in 2011, we are positioned better still.”
Borchers said even though things are operating smoothly now, they might not be that way within the next three years due to possible technology advances. He said the next scheduled rebuild of the Banner systems will be 2016 and after that the university can expect improvement in the systems operating capacity.
Erik Fink can be reached at [email protected]